100% agree. This film's underperforming on opening weekend is a combination of mediocre interest in the series in total and a marketing campaign that blew its load almost 5 months too early. Laying this mild disappointment at 2014's feet isn't really accurate - it's more like audiences need to be told/shown/promised there is something emotionally resonant/relevant to them somewhere in all that noise and vfx. They want the noise and vfx, they also just want to be reassured it's going to mean something.
The biggest problem is that Godzilla movies aren't functionally any different from any other huge "It's the End of the World And We Know It" spectacle anymore, so simply saying "We got the dragon and the moth for this one" wasn't ever going to be enough. Part of the reason that first trailer worked so well was because the Clair de Lune added some serious emotion to the imagery and made it seem like there was going to be a serious experience underneath the spectacle. And then the rest of the campaign kept going and it was all dumb one-liners and frankly confusing (and often ugly) imagery. The underwhelming critical response further weakened it, and now audiences are leaving more or less bored.
None of this is a referendum on the 2014 movie. If anything, using the 2014 movie as a factor seems like a pretty big stretch to essentially re-litigate the theory that The Last Jedi's performance hurt Solo, which Bob Iger himself already proved incorrect when he publicly apologized for refusing to shift Solo's release date back to December because he was certain Mary Poppins (which was a bigger disappointment in a better release slot) deserved it more.
Solo's disappointment is almost entirely the result of Bob Iger making the wrong call, nothing else.
100% agree. This film's underperforming on opening weekend is a combination of mediocre interest in the series in total and a marketing campaign that blew its load almost 5 months too early. Laying this mild disappointment at 2014's feet isn't really accurate - it's more like audiences need to be told/shown/promised there is something emotionally resonant/relevant to them somewhere in all that noise and vfx. They want the noise and vfx, they also just want to be reassured it's going to mean something. The biggest problem is that Godzilla movies aren't functionally any different from any other huge "It's the End of the World And We Know It" spectacle anymore, so simply saying "We got the dragon and the moth for this one" wasn't ever going to be enough. Part of the reason that first trailer worked so well was because the Clair de Lune added some serious emotion to the imagery and made it seem like there was going to be a serious experience underneath the spectacle. And then the rest of the campaign kept going and it was all dumb one-liners and frankly confusing (and often ugly) imagery. The underwhelming critical response further weakened it, and now audiences are leaving more or less bored. None of this is a referendum on the 2014 movie. If anything, using the 2014 movie as a factor seems like a pretty big stretch to essentially re-litigate the theory that The Last Jedi's performance hurt Solo, which Bob Iger himself already proved incorrect when he publicly apologized for refusing to shift Solo's release date back to December because he was certain Mary Poppins (which was a bigger disappointment in a better release slot) deserved it more. Solo's disappointment is almost entirely the result of Bob Iger making the wrong call, nothing else.